Pages

23 November 2012

Are You a Jerk? Of Course Not … Character and Situations

If you have a driver’s license and
actually drive on public roads you have encountered for sure at least one
situation when someone cut you off. Similarly while shopping in a supermarket when
approaching slowly the cash register it has happened to you at least once that
someone came in a hurry and just went in front of you at the cue. If these
things have never happened to you (which makes you an outlier) for sure you
were in a situation where a complete stranger had done something that has
mildly affected you in a negative way. Someone cutting you off on a street or getting
in front of you in line at a supermarket are annoying things, but not really
bad.

Most likely your reaction towards
the person who caused you this discomfort was something like “this guy is a
jerk” or “he’s an idiot / ass h*le”. Your natural reaction is to blame the bad
behavior on the person’s character or how psychologists like to call it –
personality.

Now let’s make a thought
exercise. Imagine that you are on your lunch break and right after you have a
very important meeting with your boss (or a client) and it is absolutely vital
that you are on time in the office. At the same time you need to get something
from the supermarket and you went during the lunch break to buy it. You have 5
minutes to go through the cash register cue and get back to your office. You
see that the cue is not long and you are happy that you’ll make it in time. As
you approach the cash register you see a middle aged lady approaching the line
with a shopping cart full of stuff. Naturally you step your pace and get in
line just in front of her. Does this sound plausible? Most likely it does.

Did you do anything wrong? Of
course not! The lady throws you an angry look and says simply “JERK”. Now you
are surprised because (in your mind) you did nothing wrong. You were in a hurry
to get to your very important meeting in time. Plus you know that the lady
would have needed at least 15 minutes to place all her stuff on the counter, to
complain to the cashier that prices have gone up, to search for her wallet,
count the money, count the change twice and so on.

Taking a step back and looking to
both situations – someone getting in front of YOU in the line and YOU getting
in front of the lady with a lot of stuff in her shopping cart, we will realize
that they are extremely similar. The
only real difference is the perspective. In the first situation you would call
the person who got in front of you a “jerk” but when you are called a “jerk”
you are at least surprised. Are you really a “jerk”? For sure you don’t
consider yourself a “jerk”…

What is going on here is
two-folded. First, each and every one of us humans needs to feel good about
ourselves. We need to live with ourselves and subsequently we need to have a
good opinion about us. The bottom-line here is that jerks don’t think about
themselves as jerks. Jerks think of themselves as normal or even nice people
and “the others” are weird.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not
saying that the person cutting in line is a jerk who has a good opinion about
himself. The key idea is that we need to justify our actions. Of course
everyone who has received a minimum of education knows that cutting in line is
not exactly a nice gesture. At the same time we have a need to justify our actions
and the person who got in front of the lady with a lot of stuff in her cart has
to justify this action. The immediate and pertinent justification is that he
was in a hurry to get back to the office in time for the very important
meeting.

The second thing that is
happening is that when you are the one doing the unpleasant deed, you become
aware of other factors that have influenced your behavior apart from your
personality.You KNOW that you are in a hurry. The lady in front of whom you
got in line DOESN'T KNOW that you are in a hurry.

When judging someone else’s actions
(or behaviors as psychologists like to say) humans infer that the action is a
product of the personality (character) and ONLY of the personality of the
person who does the action.

When judging our own actions, we
become aware of other forces that have influenced our behavior such as
contextual factors. What other forces and how they influence human behavior I
will present later. The key learning of this post is that someone’s behavior is
a product of more factors than just personality (or character).

No comments:

Connect on Linked In

Nick NAUMOF

Nick Naumof has studied people from different scientific perspectives ranging from economics to consumer behavior, behavioral economics and evolutionary psychology.
Author of “It Makes (No) Sense – In Between the Joy of Gaining and the Fear of Losing”, Nick Naumof has a unique mix of skills that allow him to translate the academic insights of behavioral science into practical applications in business and service design.
With more than seven years’ experience in developing and delivering workshops and training programs, Nick Naumof offers highly engaging and intriguing learning experiences.